


Nerio

by Aeolian



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Bucky comes home, F/M, Female Bucky Barnes, Genderswap, Misogyny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-14
Updated: 2014-08-14
Packaged: 2018-02-12 21:24:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2125161
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aeolian/pseuds/Aeolian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's an all-around miserable day in November and Ma and Becca had been three weeks cold in the ground, and Pa looked to be joining them any day now, brain half eaten away by the fever going around. She's got an itch under her skin, under her knuckles in her pocket where they're wrapped around her last measly dollars, when she hears the sounds of a fight coming from an alley.</p><p>A very one-sided fight, if her ears are to be trusted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nerio

**Author's Note:**

  * For [legete](https://archiveofourown.org/users/legete/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Enyo](https://archiveofourown.org/works/780363) by [legete](https://archiveofourown.org/users/legete/pseuds/legete). 



> So I've been re-reading legete's Enyo, which is, in my mind, the perfect always-a-girl!Bucky fic. It struck me, though, that for all Steve loves Bucky, he's never understood her very well (and vice versa). This is my attempt a bookmatched companion to that story.
> 
> I apologize for all of the horrible, horrible things I do to Bucky in this fic. We do what we must because we can.
> 
> And uh, let's pretend like HYDRA butt-kicking goes on behind the curtains, shall we?

The man on the bridge staggers, hope and consternation warring in his eyes.

"Bucky?" he asks, incredulously.

She's been called plenty of things, sure, but never that.

\----

She sits in an empty rowhouse, the walls frosted over with rime, her only company a dead woman frozen into a fetal position and a bundle of rags pressed to her chest. She was supposed to check in hours ago. The rags grizzle a little and she rocks it gently, making shushing sounds as she tugs the threadbare blanket tighter over chestnut hair. She knows that hair, remembers running her fingers through the curls, and--

She was supposed to check in hours ago.

"Stand down, I have the asset," said the man, pushing open the door. The hinges scream, on the verge of cracking. She looks up and--wasn't he (taller/shorter, broader/frailer) different?

A burst of static emits from his handheld transceiver, but he ignores it, flashing his (toothpaste ad) smile at her.

"I've been looking for you. I know you want to stay here, but we've got to look at the big picture. The world is not what we thought it was. It has been taken over by dictators and imperialists. They took the freedoms that we fought for, and twisted it to their own ends. They almost have what they want, but I know you want to stop them just as much as I do. We're right at the cusp of giving the world the freedom it deserves, and I need you by my side to do just that."

She wonders if the dead woman had any dreams before the ice dragged her under.

"The baby?" she asks, over the wailing of the wind outside.

He reaches out his hands for the infant in her arms. "Finish the mission," he says, "Then we'll talk."

\----

"So this is what the CIA sent us instead of ammunition," said the General, sneering at her flat chest, "Must have sent all the prime...assets to Vietnam instead." He spits.

("Lyudmila Mykhailivna, they say you've been to America?"

"Yes. The Americans asked if I powdered my nose on the battlefield, then told me my skirt was too long.")

She doesn't say a word.

\----

She fires four shots at the man on Insight C because he is her mission. She punches him again and again with her cold fist, because every time he opens his mouth, he knocks the mission loose. (Like teeth rattling in a head. Her fists match, flesh and blood and scabs on her knuckles. She's punching--)

She fishes him out of the Potomac because she can't not.

 

For the first time in--

For the first time, she has no mission.

 

She goes to the National Air and Space exhibit, baseball cap low over her eyes, hoping to find a directive.

 _James Buchanan Barnes_ , the placard reads, _born March 10, 1917 in Midtown West, New York. Little is known about Barnes's earliest years._

It's as good a place as any to start.

Three days later, standing lookout on the roof of an utterly unfamiliar Hell's Kitchen tenement, watching an utterly unfamiliar dusk unfurl ("Visit the original home of Captain America's friend and Howling Commando, Bucky Barnes!" exclaims the placard five stories below her), she is as unmoored as ever. 

She breaks into the Department of Records Municipal Archives next, pores over the microfilm.

There are no birth records for a Jane B. Barnes ("Your name is Jane Buchanan Barnes. You've known me your whole life."), or a marriage record for her parents in any of the five boroughs. On the second night, she discovers Winifred C. Barnes, nee Buchanan was buried on Hart Island. George M. Barnes joined her four years later, via an asylum in the Bronx. There's a note in his asylum intake records, which she skims.

"...quarantined upon reaching Gowanus by way of Shelbyville, Indiana..."

She books a ticket the next day, rides the nearly empty Amtrak train to Chicago. No one glances her way, but the palm of her weak hand sweats through the fabric of her jeans where she keeps a death grip on her thigh, waiting for--what, exactly? She shakes her head to clear it.

There's a six hour layover until her next train, so she buys a hot dog on a poppy seed bun and eats it perched on a fire escape with sightlines across the entire Navy Pier. The Ferris wheel at the end of the pier glitters as it turns slowly. Cottonwood puffs settle on her shirt and she brushes them off, and she remembers. She remembers the stuff piling like summer snowdrifts against a barn and the gaps of chicken wire, and a toddler squealing and flinging it in the air, getting it all down her little blue romper.

She boards the Illini to Mattoon, twenty odd miles from Shelbyville, and she's got no luggage but the rucksack on her back and no desire to get back on a train, so she humps it southwest. The sun is just resting on the treetops by the time she reaches a stream ("Opossum Creek" her mind supplies), and she follows it south, more by memory than the map in her head ("By observing the contour lines in detail, the five major terrain features (hilltop, valley, ridge, depression, and saddle) should be determined..."). The creek bends and bends again, and her feet automatically turn right onto the little Indian trail through a grove of elms and susurrating poplars.

The farmhouse is long gone, as are the barn, the chicken coop, and the miles of fences her great grandpapa hammered into the ground, but the big cottonwood tree her pa swore he'd cut down every June still looms protectively over Langley Pond, only it's twice as tall now.

She hides her rucksack between the trees, and she shimmies up the tree in the lazy haze of summer dusk, peering closely at the bark. She's halfway up before she finds it.

 _JBB_ is etched in blocky letters a palm's width in size, and below it, a small and shaky _RPB_. She remembers the feeling of a tiny hand in her own, in turn wrapped around the scarred cowbone handle of pa's penknife as together they scratch letters into the wood. Soft brown curls tickle her chin as the little girl squirms in her lap, complaining that she's gripping too hard.

"Almost done, Becca-roo," she says, then blinks, her cold arm wrapped around nothing in her lap. Night has fallen, and somewhere close, a mockingbird trills, "Bekaroo, bekaroo, bekaroo, bekaroo". Sodium lights glow like sunrise to the north.

She decides some things in her head are worth knocking loose (like a roller coaster carriage rattling up flimsy wooden tracks, like the slow ascent to the top of a Ferris wheel, like the first time getting on a plane), and buys a ticket back to D.C.

\----

Bucky shoves the bottle of whiskey under Steve's nose the day he was hired by the Federal Art Project.

"Look at you, kid, going places," she says, ruffling his hair.

He ducks his head in an aw-shucks grin, even as he tries to bat her hand away.

"Bucky, where'd you get this?"

She took it as payment after helping bootleggers hide their stash in the warehouse at work during a raid, way back during her cigarette-rolling job, and had since been hiding it in a top shelf in the kitchen, where she could reach with help from the kitchen stool, and Steve could reach not at all. She'd been saving it for a special occasion.

"Won it fair and square off Louise at rummy," she says, chin tilted up.

"And where'd Louise manage to find a bottle of--," Steve wipes dust off the label and does a double take, "Bushmills? Jesus, Buck."

"Ain't pouring none of that Schenley crap, cut six ways to Sunday," says Bucky, grinning, "Only the best for our Stevie."

"Coulda sprung for champagne, I think."

Bucky snorts and punches Steve, gently, in the arm.

Later that night, after they make a solid dent in the bottle, Bucky has a woozy memory of someone downstairs playing Benny Goodman over the radio, barely audible even through their newsprint-thin floor. She looks down at Steve, face aglow in what little streetlight trickles through their lone window, but he's asleep against her shoulder, so she hums softly along, _I want you to want me, but why?_

\----

When the handlers freeze her, in the moments before the tentacles of ice snake across her mind, the Asset remembers.

Spraying bullets into a crowd of students at Rangoon University (at Kent State University), watching hope wither into cynicism. Order only comes through pain.

A bullet each into the back of the head of brothers kidnapped on the way from church. The way their corpses bounce unsecured in the back of the armored truck as it worms through the jungles of northern Vietnam.

Planting a landmine on a street frequented by border patrol in As-Samu. She can't recall the explosion, but she can feel the twenty thousand casualties as if she had killed every one of them herself.

Lying on a rooftop in Prague, Soviet tanks rolling through the streets, civilians scattering before them, a smell of burning diesel in the air. She aims at a man waving a tricolored flag in Wenceslas Square, slows her heartbeat, fires.

 

Carefully regulating her breaths, staring down the scope of her rifle at--

"Soldier, you have permission to engage."

\--the profile of General Secretary Brezhnev as he bends at the waist to sign the agreement that would curtail the insane proliferation of world-ending weaponry that no one--

"Soldier, do you copy? Engage now."

\--no one should have much less egomaniacal bullies like-- ("Sometimes I think you like getting punched.")

"No," she says, voice rusty from lack of use.

"What did you say?"

She clears her throat, tries again. "No."

 

They strap her down to the leather chair that stinks of blood, piss and sweat, shove a rubber gag between her teeth and wipe her.

And wipe her.

And wipe her.

 

The next thing she remembers, her mask has been ripped off by a man who then stares at her like she's the Second Coming. It's 2014.

\----

Here's the secret: The Winter Soldier lay in cryo the first ten years of the Cold War not because she fought her handlers, but because they couldn't get her to fight at all.

Here's the secret: It wasn't Zola who finally found her hidden trigger, it was a young zealot renamed Alexander Pierce.

Here's the secret: There were some things the machine couldn't erase. One of them is this: she might not have fought clean and she might not have fought pretty, but never once did Jane Buchanan Barnes raise her fists and gun  _not_ to protect someone.

Pick on someone your own size.

\----

It takes half a day to case Steve's new apartment, which is still in Dupont Circle, still vulnerable on multiple sides to sniper attack, and still devoid of adequate security measures. She wonders how this idiot managed to stay alive for so long, much less dismantle a major intelligence agency. Breaking in takes two minutes and a bobby pin, including the climb from the ground floor.

And then the idiot himself comes around the corner, shrugging on a navy blue t-shirt, saying, "Didn't hear you come in, S-"

He stops and stares, hands frozen on the hem of his shirt. There's a feeling expanding from somewhere long dead inside her, cracking her ribs open.

"Don't just stand there with your mouth open like that," she says, voice catching in her throat, "Gonna catch flies that way."

"Bucky," he says, and the look on his face is enough to choke out whatever she was going to say next.

\----

She backs him against the wall, biting her way into his mouth. They've done this before, haven't they? One of his hands palms confidently against her nipple, rubbing it just right. She groans against his mouth.

He presses chaste, dry kisses down her throat, her clavicle, right over her heart. She gasps. He tugs the black henley over her head, and bends his head again, sucking a nipple into his mouth. She can only lock her knees against the delicious wave of pleasure, her groin aching so, so sweetly.

He lets up, panting a little, and he's the most beautiful thing she's ever seen, dark eyes and red lips and hair standing up in tufts where she'd carded her fingers through them. She slides to her knees, ghosting her cheek then her lips along the bulge in the front of his jeans, hot breath caressing his cock. He rumbles somewhere far above her, and she can feel it all the way to her toes. She closes her teeth around the zipper and is about to start pulling, when she feels his palm land against her shoulder, pushing a little.

She looks up, perplexed. Doesn't he want this?

"Bucky, you don't gotta," Steve swallows audibly, "Don’t do anything you don’t wanna do just for me, okay?"

She frowns. "What do you think I'm doing that I don't gotta do?"

It's too dark to see his face from the floor, but a few heartbeats pass before he tells her, much too gently, "I read your files."

Shame crashes down on her and she shoves away from him, putting as much distance as she can between them. Of course he wouldn't want her after knowing how dirty, how _used_ \--

"Hey," There's a rustle of clothes, and he's suddenly everywhere, knees pressed to her knees, arms encircling her shoulder, pectorals mashed against her nose. "C'mon, Buck. I'm with you 'til the end of the line. You know that."

"I don't want your pity, Rogers," she says woodenly to his chest. It smells like Ivory soap.

"Hey, look at me. You gotta know, they told me not to go looking for you. Said I might not want to pull that thread," says Steve, eyes as wide and guileless as ever, "But, you and I, we're never gonna be the kids we once were. We've lost too much over the years. And I know just how easy it'd be to let it keep you down, 'cause I almost let that happen myself. 

"But then there's you, every inch the fighter I know, fighting the good fight tooth and nail for the better part of a century. This ain't pity, Barnes, it's _pride_."

"Yeah, and all that pride and a dime'll get you a cup of joe, but it ain't gonna change the things I've done with these hands," she says, wiggling the fingers of her cold hand. They gleam unnaturally under an errant beam of light from the road and she curls around them. "And I've done some pretty God-awful things these past fifty years. You're telling me it's all gonna be swept under the rug because, 'oops, it wasn't me?'"

She feels his frown against her hair, hands stilling against her arms, "That doesn't sound like the Bucky I know."

It's like all the warmth leeches out of her skin. "Wow, are you going to tell me how I think now? Big man dictating to me how I feel?"

"No, I'm saying, used to be, I'd've been punched by now," he says lightly, "Must be going soft in your old age."

She snorts, socks him in the ribs, then slides around so they're sitting up against the wall, pressed shoulder to hip.

"That's more like it," he says, groaning and rubbing his side theatrically, "Now you gonna hear what I gotta say or what?"

"Might wanna get started before this old woman falls asleep," she says. She drags the shirt back over her head, cold now in his air-conditioned hall.

Somehow, it leads to Steve recounting story after story of the Howling Commandos. And just like in every other aspect of their lives, Steve keeps barreling forward fueled by nothing but his own bullheaded obstinacy, talking in a low, steady voice until the streetlights flicker off, a never-ending series of stories featuring Bucky saving Steve from enemy fire, Bucky saving Steve from the brass, Bucky saving Steve, Bucky saving Steve, Bucky. The stone fountain outside glows blue in the predawn light.

"I never told you, but you were--you're my hero, you know?" he says, voice raspy, the thumb of his big warm hand rubbing circles into her cold wrist. She shakes her head once, sharp.

She's been called plenty of things, sure, but never that.

\----

It's an all-around miserable day in November and Ma and Becca had been three weeks cold in the ground, and Pa looked to be joining them any day now, brain half eaten away by the fever going around. She had been staying with Aunt Edith, who's not even her real aunt anyway, but a family friend of Pa's. She's cold and hungry and tired, because Aunt Edith, who never coughed up a single red cent of the money they left her to pay for Ma and Becca's funeral, complained that Bucky was eating her out of house and home and had thrown her out onto the street that morning.

She's got an itch under her skin, under her knuckles in her pocket where they're wrapped around her last measly dollars, when she hears the sounds of a fight coming from an alley.

A very one-sided fight, if her ears are to be trusted.

She dashes into the alley, and two jerks are watching a third one kick around a boy who can't be much older than Becca.

"Hey!" she yells, and punches the nearest boy. His nose breaks with a satisfying crack.

The other two boys freeze for a second, before swinging at her. She ducks the redhead's fist, slams her elbow in the well-fed stomach of the bully with all the momentum of the feint. The boy with the broken nose is up by this point and grabs her around the middle and heaves backwards. Red aims a punch at her head, and Bucky ducks to the side, stomps on Nose's foot. Nose howls and lets her go, but not before Red's fist catches her in the cheek. Pain flares and something metallic-tasting floods Bucky's mouth. She laughs, feeling so _alive_. Everything's easy, so easy. She knees Red viciously in the crotch, and he drops like a sack of corn.

Big lunges wildly at her, fist swung too wide to hit anything and she intertwines her fingers into one big fist and slams down on the ball of his shoulder. He screams.

"What the hell's wrong with you, bitch?" he sobs, backing away until he hits the wall, arm dangling wrong by his side. Of all the names she's been called lately, especially by Aunt Edith, this just might be the nicest. A mean glow settles in her chest. Big must see something in her face, because he runs instead of running his mouth some more, Red and Nose whimpering and hobbling close on his heels. She spits after them, unladylike but utterly satisfying.

The little boy groans and lifts his head. He's got fine features, and the most delicate hands Bucky's ever held as she hauls him to his feet. The one eye that isn't swollen shut is long-lashed and even bigger than Becca's.

(She has a sudden memory of Ma reading by lamplight, "He hath made everything beautiful in its time. Also he hath set eternity in their heart.")

"Thanks pal," he says, holding out a hand for her to shake, "I'm Steve. Steve Rogers."

She doesn't know why, but the awful itch under her skin finally eases.

\----

She has no idea why she thought living with Steve would be the same as before, not that she'd remember in the first place. For one, they don't fit in the bathroom together anymore (Steve brushing his teeth while Bucky combs her hair in the tiny broken mirror, complaining all the while about her supervisor), or the kitchen, big as it is. For another, they both have nightmares, which result in a broken nightstand and two dents in the wall that first week alone. Bucky stops apologizing when she realizes how many gouges and craters the walls already had when she moved in.

They've never had such a giant bed either, the one place they actually fit together, nor the time and freedom to luxuriate in one.

She writhes, hands fisted in the sheets after a mission the new Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. sent them on, Steve sucking love bites down her stomach. He bites lightly at her hipbone, slides a thumb down her vulva. Her folds, so wet for him already, part easily.

He gives shy little kitten licks down her slit, then drags his tongue flat up the length, swirling around her clit at the end, and she's pretty quickly reduced to a gasping mess,  shaking and clenching around the fingers he's gently pumping into her. It's too much looking at all those miles of golden skin between her legs, and she has to press both palms to her face to contain all the emotions threatening to burst out of her. He twists his wrist, grinding the pads of his fingers into something deep inside of her, his tongue fluttering at the base of her clitoris, and oh, the blood roars in her ears as she comes apart at her badly-sewn seams. _  
_

She's limp and wrung out, and she can barely lift her head to look down her body at Steve, who's staring back at her with hungry eyes, lips and chin glistening with her desire. She moans, and reaches a shaking hand to haul him up and turn him gently on his back so she can clean him off tenderly, reverently, with her tongue. He captures her lips with his, and she licks into his mouth languidly, until the taste of her is gone.

She slides down his body, petting his perfect shoulders, his perfect stomach, until she can settle between his legs. She suckles on the weeping head of his cock before easing her way down his thick shaft, the earthy taste grounding her. She's got no recollection of doing this before, but it seems her body knows him better than she does, and sets off a brisk, shallow pace, her hand stroking the base.

It's all too soon before he pulls back a little, hand on her shoulder, gasping, "Bucky, Bucky, please,"

He fumbles with the drawer pull of the (new) nightstand, and turns back with a neon-colored square of foil, hands trembling and slipping over the packaging. She takes pity on him, and rips open the sheepskin package for him, slides it on, pinches the tip, and, because she's no saint, gives him a couple of indolent strokes. He groans and lets his head flop back onto the bed.

 Hand still on the base of his cock, she lowers herself slowly onto him. It's like finally sailing into port, and she sighs. She swivels her hips in figure eights, writing the lyrics to the song they've been dancing to for most of a century into his skin, forever and forever and forever. 

"Bucky," he gasps, sliding his fingers between hers, dragging their clasped hands to both sides of his head. This is where she was always meant to be, she thinks, arched almost protectively above him, like he's the one fixed point in her universe, like she's his shield. His hair fans in a golden halo around his head, and his face is the only open book she needs to know, her sola scriptura. She oscillates her hips against him, clenching on every upstroke as if she can't bear to let him go and he rises up to meet her halfway like he always does, always has in every aspect of their lives.

She can feel the pleasure rising like summer rains filling up a river, and he's gasping, "Buck, Buck, Buck," and she follows his order like she's followed every order he's ever given and bucks and bucks and bucks until her orgasm washes over her like a levee breaking--devastating and inevitable.

She comes back to herself panting against his neck, his arm thrown over her back, dick soft and spent against her thigh. She shifts a little so that her cold arm doesn't crush him.

"Jesus," she says, voice like she still smokes a pack a day, "Marry me?"

"'M not Jesus," he says, sounding as breathless as she feels, "But will I do?"

She can't not laugh, so she does and kicks him, gently, in the shin.

\----

She marries Steve Rogers on a cheery-brisk April morning, in a small, intimate ceremony in the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn, surrounded by work friends and a platoon of Wilsons. They're both cloaked with Natasha's image inducers, but it's starting to register that no matter what face she sees that thousand-watt Rogers grin on, it's still the most perfect thing she's ever seen.

"Kiss already," bawls Stark from the pews, "The rest of us don't have another hundred years to watch your Princess Bride routine play out."

**Author's Note:**

> Below are references for all the real-world events. (Also, please let me know if I'm wrong on any of these things. I'm always happy to learn)
> 
> Between 1959 and 1961, over 15 million people died during a famine all over China due to poor government planning. I've heard second-hand stories of people eating rats and bark, and articles where they resorted to eating human flesh. 
> 
> The fictitious general is refering to factual CIA involvement during the 1964 Brazilian coup d'etat, which replaced a democratically elected government with twenty years of military dictatorship.
> 
> Lyudmila Mykhailivna Pavlichenko was the greatest Soviet sniper, the greatest woman sniper, and the third great sniper in the world to date in terms of confirmed kills. She was invited by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt to tour the USA in 1942, during which she was [ridiculed and harassed by the press](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/eleanor-roosevelt-and-the-soviet-sniper-23585278/?no-ist). 
> 
> I lifted a sentence from the [U.S. Army Map Reading and Land Navigation Handbook](http://books.google.com/books?id=HCHEe1544HsC&pg=SA11-PA5#v=onepage&q&f=false), which is probably not the edition she knows, but quick, behind you! *runs away*
> 
> Blended whiskey is great. What American whiskey distilleries were selling in the mid- to late-1930s, however, was not. After prohibition ended, Schenley and the National Distillery were still waiting for their barrels of legal whiskey to mature, so they were cutting what little stock they had leftover with any alcohol they could find, plus flavoring to make it palatable. Irish whiskey, while pure, was heavily taxed ($5 a gallon doesn't sound bad, until you adjust for inflation. Then, suddenly, a bottle of booze now costs twice as much), and on top of that, the war halted Bushmill's production starting in 1939. So try not to drop that bottle, Steve, it's practically gold. No pressure.
> 
> The song on the radio is [What Have You Got That Gets Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYRtCPRrNR8).
> 
> The list of atrocities from 1962 to 1972:  
> \- Rangoon University Students Uprising: The Burmese military responded to peaceful student protests by shooting into a crowd of students, and blowing up the Student Union Building. While a few hundred students were still inside. The Kent State shootings differed in that the National Guard didn't use dynamite, at least.  
> \- Assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem: President Diem and his brother were arrested and supposed to be transported to be exiled during a coup backed by the CIA, but when they opened the armored truck at the Joint General Staff headquarters, both men were dead with bullet and stab wounds. This and JFK's assasination three weeks later marked the US's military entrance into the Vietnam War.  
> \- Samu Incident: an Israeli border patrol vehicle rolled onto a landmine on the West Bank, killing three policemen, and wounding six more. No group came forward to claim responsibility, but the Israeli claimed it was planted by al-Fatah (today the biggest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization), and the resulting feud snowballed into the Six-Day War.  
> \- Prague Spring: a period of decentralization and democratization in Czechoslovakia, until members of the Warsaw Pact invaded and brutally suppressed it. Yes, this is what the Arab Spring was named after.  
> \- Strategic Arms Limitation Talks: SALT I was the first in a series of treaties between the US and USSR on armament control. It was by no means perfect, but seemed to be a turning point in the Cold War. The same year it was ratified, the two countries started cooperating in the joint Apollo–Soyuz Test Project.
> 
> The Bible verse is part of the American Standard Version of [Ecclesiastes 3:11](http://biblehub.com/asv/ecclesiastes/3.htm).


End file.
